Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko
- Editors: Cynthia Richards, Mary Ann O'Donnell
- Pages: xv & 227 pp.
- Published: 2013
- ISBN: 9781603291286 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603291279 (Hardcover)
“This is a helpful (and affordable) resource for teachers and students. The essays provide snappy, thought-provoking and instructive suggestions for reading and teaching. Some are explicitly teaching-oriented, while others draw attention to aspects of the text in a more reflective way.”
—British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
“Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko will be a valuable addition to the bookshelves of feminist teachers not only of literature but also of history and women’s studies, especially those who focus on historical intersections of race, gender, and class.”
—Feminist Teacher
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women’s literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn’s life and work. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.
Sharon Alker
Emily Hodgson Anderson
Srinivas Aravamudan
Ana de Freitas Boe
Erik Bond
Keith M. Botelho
Vincent Carretta
Ashley Cross
Laura Doyle
Karen Gevirtz
Derek Hughes
Scott J. Juengel
Thomas W. Krise
Joyce Green MacDonald
Roberta C. Martin
Shawn Lisa Maurer
Jane Milling
Jessica Munns
Holly Faith Nelson
Bill Overton
Leslie Richardson
Laura J. Rosenthal
Margarete Rubik
Laura L. Runge
Jane Spencer
Laura M. Stevens
James Grantham Turner
Rose Zimbardo
Preface
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Basic Resources
Editions
Classroom Texts
Online Editions
Concordances
Bibliographies
Biographies
Monographs
Collected Essays
Book Chapters and Articles
Discussions of Race and Slavery
Historical Approaches
Comparative Approaches
Surinam
Other Approaches
Maps and Illustrations
Additional Online Resources
Chronology
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction
Formal and Thematic Contexts
What Kind of Story Is This?
Credibility and Truth in Oroonoko
Oroonoko: Romance to Novel
The Language of Oroonoko
Oroonoko and the Heroics of Virtue
Cultural Contexts
Oroonoko and Blackness
Economic Oroonoko
The Traffic of Women: Oroonoko in an Atlantic Framework
Entering Atlantic History: Oroonoko, Revolution, and Race
Writing War in Oroonoko
Oroonoko as a Caribbean Text
Pedagogical Contexts
How Big Did She Say That Snake Was? Teaching the Contradiction in Oroonoko
Teaching Oroonoko in a Literature Survey 1 Course
Teaching Oroonoko in a Literature Survey 2 Course
Teaching Oroonoko in the Travel Narrative Course
Teaching Oroonoko at a Historically Black University
Teaching the Teachers: Oroonoko as a Lesson in Critical Self-Consciousness
Comparative Contexts
Oroonoko’s Cosmopolitans
Teaching Oroonoko with Milton and Dryden; or, Behn’s Use of the Heroic
Teaching Oroonoko with Early Modern Drama
Unbearable Theater: Oroonoko’s Sentimental Afterlife
Two Oroonokos: Behn’s and Bandele’s
Representations of Race, Status, and Slavery in Behn’s Oroonoko and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
Authorial Contexts
The Early Modern Body in Behn’s Poetry and Oroonoko
Oroonoko and the Problem of Teaching Novelty
Transatlantic Crossing: Teaching Oroonoko with The Widdow Ranter
Behn and the Canon
Notes on Contributors
Survey Participants
Works Cited
Index
Series Page
“Oroonoko is an excellent choice for this series because of its popularity in an exceptionally broad range of college and university courses, and this volume does an excellent job presenting the scholarly and pedagogical diversity used in teaching the work.”
—Richard Frohock, Oklahoma State University
“The depth and range of material presented in this volume, and the care taken to make it both practical and accessible for instructors as well as engaging and provocative for scholars, make the collection an essential and invaluable resource.”
—Early Modern Women
